Like Teneriff, or Atlas, unremov'd:
His stature reach'd the sky."
Then would have come the tug of war—then
"Dreadful deeds
Might have ensued;"
and would have ensued—
"Had not soon
The Eternal, to prevent such horrid fray,
Hung forth in heaven his golden scales."—
The fiend look'd up and knew
His mounted scale aloft; nor more, but fled
Murmuring, and with him fled the shades of night."
But in the interview which Miss Barrett describes between Gabriel and Lucifer, no such headlong propensity to act is manifested by either party—no such crisis ensues to interrupt the fray. Gabriel is satisfied with giving utterance to a feeble threat, which, when he finds that Lucifer pays no attention to it, he never attempts to carry into execution. For no apparent cause, he suddenly changes his tone, and condescends to hold parley with his foe on a variety of not very interesting particulars, informing him, among other things, that he "does not dream!" The following is Lucifer's description of our First Mother. It is impregnated with Miss Barrett's mannerisms, and strongly characterized by that fantastical and untrue mode of picturing sensible objects, which the example of Shelley and Keates tended especially to foster, if they were not the first to introduce it:—
" Lucifer. Curse freely! curses thicken. Why, this Eve
Who thought me once part worthy of her ear,
And somewhat wiser than the other beasts,—
Drawing together her large globes of eyes,
The light of which is throbbing in and out
Around their continuity of gaze,—
Knots her fair eyebrows in so hard a knot,
And, down from her white heights of womanhood,
Looks on me so amazed,—I scarce should fear
To wager such an apple as she pluck'd,
Against one riper from the tree of life,
That she could curse too—as a woman may—
Smooth in the vowels."
We do not very well understand why Eve's curses should have been smoother in the vowels than in the consonants. But as we are no great elocutionists, or at all well conversant with the mysteries of "labials," "dentals," and "gutterals," we shall not contest the point with Lucifer, lest we should only expose our own ignorance.
Respecting the leading conception of her drama, Miss Barrett writes thus:—"My subject was the new and strange experience of the fallen humanity as it went forth from Paradise into the wilderness; with a peculiar reference to Eve's allotted grief, which, considering that self-sacrifice belonged to her womanhood, and the consciousness of originating the Fall to her offence—appeared to me imperfectly apprehended hitherto, and more expressible by a woman than a man." No wonder that Miss Barrett failed in her undertaking. In the conception of Eve's grief as distinguished from Adam's, and as coloured by the circumstances of her situation—namely, by the consciousness that she had been the first to fall, and the proximate cause of Adam's transgression—there is certainly no sufficient foundation to sustain the weight of a dramatic poem. At the most, it might have furnished materials for a sonnet. It therefore detracts nothing from the genius of Miss Barrett to say, that her attempt has been unsuccessful. She has tried to make bricks not only without straw, but almost without clay; and that being the case, the marvel is that she should have succeeded so well.
"There was room at least," con-
